keep a still tongue! But if M. Safrac is not a sorcerer
and fortune-teller, why does he spend his time reading books?"

The waggon stopped in front of the presbytery.

I left the idiot, and followed the cure's servant, who conducted me to
her master in a room where the table was already laid. I found M. Safrac
greatly changed in the three years since I had last seen him. His tall
figure was bent He was excessively emaciated. Two piercing eyes glowed
in his thin face. His nose, which seemed to have grown longer, descended
over his shrunken lips. I fell into his arms.

"My father, my father," I cried, sobbing, "I have come to you because
I have sinned. My father, my dear old master, whose profound and
mysterious knowledge overawed my mind, and who yet reassured it with a
revelation of maternal tenderness, save your child from the brink of a
precipice. O my only friend, save me; enlighten me, you my only beacon!"

He embraced me, and smiled on me with that exquisite kindness of which
he had given so many proofs during my childhood, and then he stepped
back, as if to see me better.

"Well, adieu!" he said, greeting me according to the custom of his
country, for M. Safrac was born on the banks of the Garonne, in the home
of those famous wines which seemed the symbol of his own generous and
fragrant soul.

After having taught philosophy with great distinction in Bordeaux,
Poitiers and Paris, he asked as his only reward the gift of a poor cure
in the country where he had been born and where he wished to die. He had
now been priest at Artigues for six years, and in this obscure village
he practised the most humble piety and the most enlightened sciences.

"Well, adieu! my child," he repeated. "You wrote me a letter to announce
your coming which has moved me deeply. It is true, then, that you have
not forgotten your old master?"

I tried to throw myself at his feet

"Save me! save me!" I stammered.

But he stopped me with a gesture at once imperious and gentle.

"You shall tell me to-morrow, Ary, what you have to tell. First, warm
yourself. Then we will have supper, for you must be very hungry and very
thirsty."

The servant placed on the table the soup-tureen out of which rose a
fragrant column of steam. She was an old woman, her hair hidden under
a black kerchief, and in her wrinkled face were strongly mingled the
beauty of race and the ugliness of decay. I was in profound distress,
and yet the peace of this sai